I know that the general human failure to assess risks appropriately is one of those things we dweebs kvetch about all the time (and certain kinds of insurance purveyors profit from), but what the hell. Might as well blather on about it again.

Here’s a graphic disinterred from Newsweek’s gravefrom way back in 2010.

I’m really posting this as an addendum to Doug J’s take on the lead/crime story. He noted that Americans don’t actually realize how much crime rates have dropped over the last couple of decades; the graphic below widens the net of things Americans (and people in general) have trouble accepting in our inevitable encounters with risk. I’m sure pointing this old story out once again will do as much good to the how-great-it-is-to-be-armed as young Kevin Bacon achieved in this scene. Still, one must but try, so here it is:

Just as a hint to where some posting thoughts are going — I was struck in reading both Kevin Drum’s lead story and looking over the juxtapositions above by the number of times the appropriate response to the data comes from the world of public health. That’s hardly the glamour end of medicine or social policy, but considering the returns we’ve already got from things like clean water and childhood vaccination, public health becomes one way to thin k about essential medicine, social policy — even justice, and economic returns.

The dicey bit, of course, is that if you accept for the moment Drum’s argument that lead in the environment drives all kinds of consequences over decades-long timescales, it becomes brutally obvious that the GOP approach is hopeless. There’s no government-free market solution to the problem. Which means that there is no solution to be had from our current Republican party. Which, I suppose, is why it’s important to repeat what’s been said so often before — the GOP has a fundamentally failed conception of government and society, and hence it’s time as a political force must come to an end. More to come on this theme.

And with that, it’s the cocktail hour,* and — why not?! — time for an open thread.

*Satan’s Whiskers? Really? Did folks drink that and live?¹

¹Which prompts the hideous and blasphemous pun: if Jesus were an organ donor would he have said “surely my liver redeemeth?” OK. I’m sorry. I’ll shut up now.

” There’s no government-free market solution to the [lead pollution] problem. Which means that there is no solution to be had from our current Republican party. Which, I suppose, is why it’s important to repeat what’s been said so often before… the GOP has a fundamentally failed conception of government and society, and hence it’s time as a political force must come to an end. More to come on this theme. ”

If you removed the meddlesome big government regulations that interfere with perfect free markets in human capital, that would fix it. Indentured servitude for thirty years or more would remove the externality. FDR wrecked everything and turned the country commie when he outlawed it.

@Baud: Even in that situation, how do you resolve a dispute? Where do you turn if there is a good faith disagreement over the deal? I mean does a cow equal three heaping bushels of wheat or is it three level ones? If I own the cow, I know what I want. But then why would I buy the cow if I am getting the milk for free?

Deep question.. Who are the RINO’s? I think they are the tea baggers and john birchers although certain people from Red State would disagree with me.
Also, too I had Pizza for supper although it was the Trader Joe’s variety.

@Baud: See that isn’t enforceable without a government, because my friends and I could come over with our spiky sticks and nobbly clubs and demand a rescission of the contract. Courts do have a purpose. Besides, that cow’s a slut.

But the basic idea — that, say, the focus on gun crime may not capture the real risks of gun ownership — is one that it’s important to reiterate. Or, more generally that the star quality of a risk is not a good measure of the actual risks faced.

And really, this is all a gateway post for me to write about something that’s been bugging me for several months now amidst all the nonsense about the Federal government’s fiscal circumstances: it’s the policy, stupid.

@The Other Chuck: Exactly. Just leave things to the Free Market (TM), that will get everything fixed in no time at all! Or maybe we just become informed consumers of medical services. One or two Google searches should get you up to speed, right?

The flip side of this is that many of the things that used to be huge problems have been handled by relatively boring solutions that we barely notice. Improvements to our lifespan have mostly come from prevention (e.g. vaccination, clean water, decent nutrition, etc.) than from amazing cures (e.g. modern surgery, cancer treatment, etc.). We underestimate the importance of bad things not happening and overestimate the importance of dramatic fixes to things that have gone bad.

@cathyx: Ah, but if we throw in the factoid that home is one of the geographic epicenters of risk, we might be able to drive them under their beds in quaking quivering fear. Then we pull out the Radon and the dangerdangerdanger of dust, especially the little stuff you can’t see.

Stress Tolerance: Respond to difficult, stressful or sensitive situations in ways that reduce or minimize potential conflict and maintains good working relationships among internal and external customers.

If there is no ‘no government-free market solution to the problem’, then it isn’t a problem. That, I think, is the correct teaparty answer.

If there’s no government-free market solution to the problem, then doing anything about it is an assault on freedom much worse than whatever the problem is. The only exception is if the government solution involves throwing lots of non-white people in jail and/or undermining the 4th through 8th Amendments.

Don’t underestimate improved maternal nutrition and generally improved hygiene for reduced infant mortality. Whenever I think of this kind of thing, I wish we still had the kind of government that was willing to put out pro-government propaganda like “So Much for So Little“.

@scav: If you look carefully you can still find them that way. It’s not something that you find on the shelves at Kroger however.

@Omnes Omnibus: That and Dawg talking. He’s not totally aware of just how much he lowers my blood pressure. I might tell him one day, but I also made the mistake of calling him sir the other day. I may have unleashed a monster there.

Satan’s Whiskers – Grand Mariner – orange bitters = Bronx cocktail. Very refreshing, and honored with a mention by Nick Charles at the beginning of THE THIN MAN. If it’s on Nick’s dance card (literally in the film) it can’t be all bad, right?

I expect that a good number of these (if people really are more afraid of X than Y) could be explained by cognitive biases.

For example, if we overestimate our degree of control over what happens, I think we’re more likely to be afraid of the actions of other people (e.g., child abduction by strangers) than of accidents (e.g. child drowning). Ditto death by allergy, airplane accident, murder (not under our control) versus death by accidental poisoning, car crash, suicide (assumed to be under our control). Some of the remaining can be explained by greater fear of the unfamiliar (e.g., terrorist attacks versus the flu and shark attacks versus dog bites).

@Omnes Omnibus:
Most of the classic American whiskey cocktails were invented with rye in mind. I assume some of this is because rye is harsher than Bourbon and less fun to drink straight. You can substitute Canadian whisky or Bourbon, but rye is the traditional choice.

@Mandalay:
Home resident deaths arising from home invasion
vs.
Accidental deaths arising from having a gun in the house.

Didn’t find numbers but did find this:

Many individuals do (44 percent of households in Washington state have a gun), and they keep those handguns loaded and unlocked — despite studies, conducted here in King County, showing that people in the home are 43 times more likely to be killed by that gun than is an intruder.

Another uplifting story for 2013:
– Part of a soccer crowd in Italy started throwing racial abuse whenever a black player of the visiting team (AC Milan) got the ball.
– Eventually one of those players, Kevin-Prince Boateng, got sick of it, kicked the ball into the crowd, and walked off the pitch.
– It gets better: His (mostly white) team mates also walked off in support.
– It gets even better: The non-racist portion of the crown applauded Boateng, despite the game being abandoned.
– It gets really fucking good: the chairman of Milan is none other than Sivio Berlusconi. He backed Boateng, and said that his team (one of the most best in the world) will walk off again in any match if there is racial abuse.

Stress Tolerance: Respond to difficult, stressful or sensitive situations in ways that reduce or minimize potential conflict and maintains good working relationships among internal and external customers.

The obvious solution with that job would be to take a few bites from your homemade brownies, wouldn’t it?

@Linda Featheringill: You simply cannot convince people that no one is going to come into their house to kill them; they just know they’re going to use that gun to defend their family. I have a relative who will not venture even knee-deep into the Pacific Ocean because she’s afraid of sharks. Pointing out that the chance of her being killed by a shark is less than 1/10,000,000 and probably less than 1/100,000,000* does no good: “What if I’m the one?” she insists. (At least when she doesn’t go in the water there’s no chance of anyone being shot.)

* Numbers I pretty much made up. But there’s a shark-related fatality in these coastal waters maybe every decade or so, and when you figure in the millions and millions millions of entries into the ocean every year, well …

@Mandalay: In the Euro 2012 tournament, UEFA told the players they’d be “cautioned” if they walked off the pitch in protest due to racism. I’m glad to see that Boateng’s walk off has received so much support. Something has to change there. It’s just appalling.

The claim is that handing patients from one group of caregivers to another is a prime cause of medical errors. The old group may fail to pass on important information about the patients’ condition, or the new group may screw up in passing out responsibilities so that patients don’t get the level of care they need. Proponents of long shifts claim that they reduce errors on handover by reducing the number of handovers. The counter-argument is that caregivers are more likely to make preventable errors when they’re tired, so shifts should be kept to reasonable lengths, and the issue of handover errors should be controlled by having better procedures.

It’s apparently a major argument in medical circles, with traditionalists favoring long shifts and modernizers advocating shorter. My gut feeling is that the people advocating shorter shifts are probably correct. The problem of errors caused by improper hand-off of patients is at least theoretically solvable by better procedures. The same thing is not true of errors caused by fatigue; the only solution there is not to have people working when they’re tired.

Markets are never literally free, i.e. they don’t exist without rules of some sort. Even the simplest barter situations involve discussions – negotiations – about how many bushels of wheat are worth one cow. Negotiations involve agreement about basic rules. So the concept of laissez-faire (free to do) capitalism is literally an oxymoron. What the GOP wants is, in fact, to execute a soft coup in which the oligarchs simply quietly seize the economic system and the government actors in all three branches become simply marionette puppets. Since this involves a long campaign (ALEC and many others) to undermine a large number of constituencies and forms of government, this would take a long time. It is also profoundly and arrogantly unrealistic, which is why we are seeing the rabid thrashings of the right-wing extremists in frustration.

Sad to say that US seems to have more deaths due to ‘misadventures’ in patient medical care than average in OECD, and that includes most EU countries with restrictions on hours. So, there are other factors at play. UK is about at OECD average.

‘Misadventure’ is the diplomatic OECD health statistics jargon for mistakes.

1) Patient handovers are a potential source of error, so we want to minimize them by having longer shifts.
2) Worker fatigue is a potential source of error, so we want to minimize it by having shorter shifts.

Since the two factors work in opposite directions, the answer has to involve finding a happy medium. We probably don’t want to go with 40 hour shifts, since fatigue errors will skyrocket. At the same time, we don’t want to go with 4 hour shifts, since that will involve too many handovers.

My gut feeling is that the problem comes with treating handover errors as though they’re an inevitable problem that can only be handled by going with long shifts. Instead, hospitals need to concentrate on minimizing handover errors through better procedures. That will let them use shorter shifts that minimize fatigue errors without causing the total number of errors to skyrocket. The bigger issue is that procedures intended to avoid preventable mistakes (e.g. reliable patient handover, proper medical hygiene, double-checking medications, etc.) need to be as much a part of medical training as direct patient care.

@Roger Moore:
Last hospital situation I was in the nurse in charge of a patient had a board in the room with all the necessary info on it. In plain sight and each shift change the nurse had to come in the room and sign the board. Very clear and easy both to understand and to insure that procedures were followed. This was Kaiser, an HMO. At the VA every time you get handed off you get asked for id to make sure anything that is done happens to the correct person. It also insures that everyone has to read the chart to see what is going on.

@Baud:
A tribal structure is a government. A commune is a government structure. A pack of dogs has a structure with rules and so on. That’s a government. Most things that involve groups of humans and an awful lot that involve groups of animals end up having structure, and that is a form of government. It might be different that we are used to but they are forms of government. Even libtards and teatards want government, they just want to have a lot less of it than most of us.

@mainmati: Even the most ardent free-marketeers will tell you perfect markets cannot exist without perfect information.

It’s just that “imperfect information” makes it sound like a few minutes delay in prices, or vague quotes … when it’s really more about a vast number of market makers and movers being complete lying cheating sacks of shit who have rigged the whole game in their favor, and then leverage that power to give themselves the freedom to dump poison in the air and water while shredding the social contract that gets in their way.

But hey it’s just “imperfect information”, we just need to do our research like good consumers should, right?

Just finished a marvelous book called The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum about the birth of forensics in New York in the 20s and 30s. Have to say, if anyone thinks “the free market” would do anything to prevent the free-floating toxins back in the day (and I ain’t just talkin’ lead, here) then we’d still have them.

It would be nice to see a bit more rational risk analysis driving public policy decisions.

I’m repeating myself here, but about 500 or s children are killed each year in firearms accidents, which is about 10 times the amount that are killed in school shootings. The former could be prevented by education and gun locks/secure gun storage- ideas that are widely accepted. But almost all of oxygen is sucked out of the air by people posturing about the latter.

@Roger Moore: hmm. If only there was some kind of way to communicate what work was done and what needed to be done in a portable medium that could be easily read. No one bothered to read the charts? Everyone was keeping information in their heads? Seems like there could be a solution to that. But then this is a field where even the idea of the “checklist” involves 10 years of serious heated discussion.

@The Other Chuck:
The classic example of the effect of imperfect information is the way the value of a car plummets as soon as it’s driven off the lot. Why? Because used cars are a classic example of information asymmetry: the seller knows a lot more about their history than the buyer. Buyers are forced to demand a steep discount to deal with the chance that the seller is trying to unload a lemon.

The former could be prevented by education and gun locks/secure gun storage- ideas that are widely accepted. But almost all of oxygen is sucked out of the air by people posturing about the latter.

Except that you have it backward. It isn’t the people posturing about mass shootings who are preventing discussion about safe storage; it’s the gun lobby. They’re opposed to any laws regarding safe storage and have fought against such laws in legislatures and in court.

This is bullshit. Nothing stops the gun lobby from standing for gun safes and trigger locks. NOTHING.

Except that you have it backward. It isn’t the people posturing about mass shootings who are preventing discussion about safe storage; it’s the gun lobby. They’re opposed to any laws regarding safe storage and have fought against such laws in legislatures and in court.

There’s the gun lobby and then there’s gun manufacturers and then there’s gun owners. The vast majority of gun owners will say they are in favor of “gun safety” or “safe gun storage” when asked.

I’m not sure where “gun manufacturers” stand in all of this, but I do know that the last few new guns I’ve purchased came with a trigger lock in the case. I’m in California, where there is sort of a requirement for trigger locks with new gun sales, but these guns came from jurisdictions that did not have such laws. The manufacturer realized that it was cheaper to just include locks with all new guns rather than to try to figure out which jurisdictions required trigger locks. They’re cheap. When California instituted the “trigger lock” law a few years ago, there was a program (I believe state funded) that gave away trigger locks. That seems like a good idea.

As for the gun lobby, I haven’t followed whether the “gun lobby” opposed trigger locks. You may be right. But if there is to be a fight with the gun lobby, it seems that the best battleground to choose is one where most gun owners agree with you and where the problem is 10 times as large as the one where fewer gun owners agree with you.

And I’m not sure that legislation mandating trigger locks/safes is the best way to go. Enforcement only usually become possible after some parents kid has just killed himself, or a playmate, so DAs aren’t terribly motivated then to charge the parent with a felony. Education would be the better route. But they’re not exclusive, of course.

There’s no government-free market solution to the [lead pollution] problem. Which means that there is no solution to be had from our current Republican party.

Sure there is, because the Repuke party is structured to benefit from perpetuating societal problems. Remove all lead pollution restrictions Strangling Our Free Market Corporate Heroes, etc. Poor people who can’t afford to move get poisoned. Poisoned kids grow up to commit violent commit crimes. The police/courts/firearms/prison industry gets more business, and the climate of fear of crime elects more Repukes.
All Repuke interests benefit, which to them is a “solution” because no-one else matters except their tribe; you just have to be sociopathic enough to not give a crap about regular people getting poisoned.

Pro Patria’s president, Pietro Vavassori, announced that he would open the club’s stadium to “all people of colour” at their next match.

“Our hope is that the other Lega Pro [third and fourth division] presidents also support this initiative,” Vavassori said. “The people who made those chants are not regular fans, but rather people who came to the stadium with the intention of ruining a festive match.”

The stadium was only open to whites? Lombardy is probably about as white as Idaho, but he makes it sound like they were actively keeping nonwhites out. Nice “no true Scotsman” there, too.